The Culture of Narcissism

A Review of Christopher's Lasch Seminal Work

Christopher Lasch wrote the book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminshing Expectations in 1979. In this lecture he goes through the main themes of his book, which although 45 years old are remarkably apt for our time. This was originally published in The Scottish Union for Education Newsletter 31, 31 August 2023.

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If the meteoric rise of TikTok and SnapChat hasn’t clued you in yet, society has an unhealthy ‘trend’ to self-absorption. In this 51-minute video, historian, moralist and social critic Christopher Lasch explores this trend, defining it as the ‘pathology of our age’, shaping families, healthcare, governance and business. Through this, he makes a case that this trend will only lead to further nihilism within the self and the larger culture as the normative schedule of psychosocial development is corrupted. This is a dense video, but it’s definitely worth your time if you want to further grasp the upside-down world we now find ourselves in.

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How Lasch weaves social, historical and psychological trends is masterful. His reference to a societal ‘hypochondria’ wherein sickness is anticipated and constant fear of malaise is maintained speaks to the innate nihilism (becoming) embedded in our world. Wherein constant analysis, an abdication of wellness and health, derives not from living but rather tests and validation from external sources, with this pattern of ‘wellbeing validation’ involving experts who can only focus on singular areas of our lives, thus creating a narcissistic feedback loop. Wherein family life, in particular the life and role of the mother (although he says the same could be applied to fatherhood), becomes mediated through self-help books and parenting manuals and speaks very little to the traditional and inherent historical continuity of family. This failure to ‘live’ leads to further atomisation of society and self and a strange world where no one is responsible. In the sea of this dysfunction, things like work assume an abstract quality, and success is defined not by the physical and measurable aspects of employment but on abstract lines of the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. We can see this directly in the proliferation of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes in the corporate world.

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All this is fed by our consumption of technology and images, our share loop wherein the idea of existence is embedded in these rituals of constant surveillance. We live in a time in which the possibility of the current moment being scrutinised and judged cannot be underestimated. In the end he sees the societal dysfunction of narcissism: an ethic rooted in self-preservation and psychic survival, a deviation from past ideas of economic warfare, the roles of crime, and social disorder but rather coming from the experience of subjective and personal experience of a disenchantment – ‘a faith without a faith’.